DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) -A German court found Syrian citizen Issa Al Hasan guilty of an Islamic State-inspired 2024 stabbing attack on a festival in the western city of Solingen in which three people were killed and 10 others injured, sentencing him to life imprisonment.
The attack upended the election campaign heading up to this year’s national election, boosting the far-right Alternative for Germany and contributing to now-Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s decision to double down on migration controls as a focus of his campaign.
Born in Syria in 1998, Al Hasan had targeted the festival, commemorating the 650th anniversary of Solingen’s founding, in the belief that “unbelievers” would be found there, prosecutors said.
Before the attack on August 23, 2024, he had been in touch with an IS handler via the Telegram messaging platform, recording a video announcing his allegiance.
Al Hasan entered the crowd and stabbed wildly around himself in the crowd, aiming for bystanders’ throats and upper bodies, according to investigators.
He told a court-appointed adviser that he himself had to flee IS in 2013, during the Syrian civil war. One of hundreds of thousands displaced by the conflict, he came to Germany in 2022.
Al Hasan, who confessed to authorities on his arrest, appeared contrite at the start of the trial in May, staring dejectedly at his desk and telling the court he “bore a heavy burden of guilt”.
Later, he adopted a more defiant attitude, saying his attack was justified by Germany’s sales of weapons for Israel’s invasion of Gaza and that he could not bear seeing people in Germany dance while Palestinian children were killed.
“I just want to go to prison and talk about it no longer,” he told a judge during his trial, local public broadcaster WDR reported.
(Reporting by Tom Kaeckenhoff in Duesseldorf and Thomas Escritt in Berlin, editing by Thomas Seythal)
